A glass menagerie: Rare negatives give glimpse into city's history

Glass negatives by photographer E.J.C. Smith, taken circa 1898. His photo store was located at 276 Smith Street in Winnipeg. - Wayne Glowacki/Winnipeg Free PressThe glass negatives transport viewers to early life in Winnipeg, portraits of its citizens and even a canoe ride down the Red River. Often the background is as important as the main subject. - View from the Forks across the Red River at the original St.Boniface Cathedral on Taché before the basilica was built. - The negatives were found in faded boxes that bore red stamps — SMITH PHOTOGRAPHER 276 Smith Street, Winnipeg — and contained the four-and-a-quarter-inch square Vive Special Rapid Dry Plates made in Chicago. - E.J.C. Smith frequently placed advertisements in the Manitoba Free Press at the turn of the century selling the latest camera equipment from his shop or the want ad: “A1 Man Needed For Developing.” Unfortunately, it’s unclear if Smith was the photographer of these images. - It's easy to understand why most of the pictures were taken outdoors. The manual states the camera may require an exposure time of a minute or a minute-and-a-half when taking interior pictures by dull, cloudy window light. - The Vive Camera Company ended operations in 1908. The camera manual states: “No other camera is so simple and sure.” - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

In 1898, you could purchase a Vive box camera for $5. More than 110 years later, no one at the Free Press knows how the old Vive glass negatives ended up in one of the drawers in our photo archives — decades untouched. But the power of a photograph in capturing a moment in time is undeniable when the negatives have been scanned and viewed as positive images.
— Wayne Glowacki, Winnipeg Free Press photojournalist

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